


Different Ways of Being What We Are

by Queue



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 03:45:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5482169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/pseuds/Queue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Baking power.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Different Ways of Being What We Are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neuxue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuxue/gifts).



There are different ways of being what we are. –Constantine

  

The morning after that first post-Bo night with Con, for the first time since Charlie’d made the bakery my fiefdom, I dragged my tea-sodden self to the coffeehouse without any clear idea of what I’d do with myself once I got there.

Yes, there were going to have to be cinnamon rolls if I didn’t want the customers to riot, which I didn’t particularly unless the cause was benevolent and the riot friendly, like the melée between regulars Mel’d had to break up the first time we ran out of Queen’s Cakes. (There were also going to have to be cinnamon rolls because otherwise the Blob would take over the bakery. This had happened once early in my time as undisputed bakery empress. I still sometimes found dried dough in unlikely, not to say inspection-violating, places.) And muffins, probably bran and maple oatmeal and carrot sesame whatever-I-had-a-bit-of-in-the-pantry. And something at least vaguely cookieish for the lunch crowd to take to go.

Otherwise, the morning promised the usual: rolling and pummeling and sifting and shifting, fights with Mom and the mixer (separately, necessarily, and I’d be more likely to come out the winner in the latter), smacking Paulie’s hand for the eleventeenth time when he tried like the taste-deaf idiot he wasn’t to put mace in the cranberry-pumpkin tea bread.

But the usual was all routine, part of the luxuriously everyday existence I’d unwittingly led as Rae Seddon, Coffeehouse Baker But Not, Under Any Circumstances, Wielder of Magic or Killer (or Savior) of Vampires. And after the last… days? weeks? months?—the exact point of divergence from the norm kept shifting in my mind, which didn’t do much for the peace thereof—I didn’t feel entitled to ordinary. I couldn’t even see the delicious happiness of ordinary from where I stood, with new scars on my body and Con’s scent as strong in my deer-keen nose as the familiar smells of baking, cinnamon and caramel and fine-ground flour.

I’d wrestled with so much knowledge I hadn’t asked for, these last few months. I’d seen and done so many horrible things, just _thinking_ of a lot of which felt like putting the paddles to a still-beating heart. I’d dealt with so much unwanted, impossible, incontrovertible change. In the harsh light of all that, the usual simply didn’t feel like _enough_ anymore. I needed something new, something that came, not from others or Others, but from me. That I invented and intended and wanted to happen. Something unequivocally both good and _mine_.

Only trouble was, I’d no idea what.

No solution having presented itself by the time I got to the coffeehouse, I fell back on routine and got to work pummeling dough. At ten, with the morning rush behind us, I ate my second breakfast standing in the doorway to the back patio, eyes closed and face turned up to the sun, basking, until the light through my lids changed and I opened them, startled, to find Mel’s tattooed hand waving lazily in front of my face.

“Paulie’s turn for a break,” he said when I looked at him, and grinned at my expression. “By the way: dibs on the first piece.”

“Of what?”

“Whatever you’re dreaming up in there.” He knocked gently against my forehead under the improbably lurid tie-dyed headband I’d unearthed that morning to keep the hair out of my face. “I know that look. It’s a good one on you. Haven’t seen it since … haven’t seen it in a while.”

Hmm. I raised an eyebrow at him and went back inside to take care of the late-morning scone-and-muffin crowd.

This time, as I worked, I suddenly realized that my brain had begun to buzz. Not literally, though I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised by that if it had. But something was definitely going on behind my standard Grumpy Baker public face. My tree was stirring, and in no uncertain terms. I could almost feel the—well, not gears turning, I didn’t think my tree had gears per se, trees not being particularly mech as a rule, so this was something else—a flowering, a leafing, a burgeoning? Whatever you called it when a tree began to pass from one stage of growth into another.

To become something new.

With, in this case, considerable enthusiasm—and apparently also a joyful noise, as I discovered when I opened my mouth to bitch at Paulie for the skegging goddam humming and found myself (a) alone in the kitchen (b) singing out loud. Singing not being anywhere on my list of skills—at least not the actual tune-carrying kind of singing—I sheered right quick and made myself stand quiet for a minute, flour-dusted hands loose at my sides, listening to the rustle (buzz) of leaves, breathing in the bakery atmosphere and remembering what it had been like to think I’d never have that scent in my life (clothes, hair) again.

Out of nowhere, my hands—my light-webbed hands, my once-poisoned hands, my kneading and stirring and baking hands—tingled fiercely, as though socketed. Over the base notes of flour and butter and rising agents, I could smell the specific substances I’d mixed with those constants to make the day’s offerings, sweet spice and golden syrup and the sharp bite of citrus—could smell them so strongly I could very nearly see their scents twining around one another in the fragrant warm air. But now that air also held traces of ingredients I knew I hadn’t yet used today. Rich earthy molasses. The brownest of sugars. Chocolate so dark as to be nearly black, dense and demanding and just barely, scantly honeyed on the tongue. The most untamed of yeasts. Almonds and hazelnuts, roasted and intense.

All the deepest sweet tastes I could imagine.

I was moving again before I knew it, reaching for the pad and pencil I kept on the counter (past experience having long since proven that pens and keyboards alike fared poorly when flour got flung about), pushing aside spoons and spatulas and scraps of dough to make room and then scribbling away almost faster than my hands could manage. Wild Chocolate Sourdough. Raspberry Ruination. Devi Dogs. Chai Nut Buttercups. Sunshine’s Springerle. Cocoa Chaos. Ideas seemed to pour from my light-livened mind through my fingers to the splotched pages, so many so quickly that I could hardly get even the basics down.

Yes: this. _Of course_ this. _This_ was what I needed now to do with myself. New recipes meant new ways to feed people, and new ways to feed people meant new ways to be—to _stay_ —myself.

I’d been through the fires of Carthaginian hell, and I felt—and looked, I knew—more than a bit singed round the edges as a result of that long strange trip. But I was, after all, still me.

As with chocolate: heat it, melt it, render it liquid, it remained essentially itself.

I could be these things, be what I’d been and what I wanted still to be: Sunshine and Rae, baker and bitch, coward and creator, whose once-upon-a-time kali damn choice to keep a vampire alive was skegging well _not_ going to define her life any more than did her blood or her bones or her knife-changing hands.

I could make these breads and cakes and confections—my just desserts, my new dreams and brainstorms—happen. I could _do_ this.

My tree said _Yessssss._

 

*****

 

It is easier to change something into something like itself: a feather into another feather, a flower into a flower. –Sunshine

 

Except that down where I kept the dark wet bloody memories mostly stuffed away, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple, and I was right.

Because. Heat chocolate and yes, you still have chocolate at the end of the day. But unless you use the kind of stuff I would not let within ten blocks of my bakery for a million pre-Wars blinks, all wax and corn syrup and natural flavorings that aren’t either one and about as much actual cacao in the bar as in the wrapper it came in, tempering chocolate—changing its state—changes its nature as well.

When it comes to chocolate and heat, those alterations are just physical. (Well. Unless you buy the argument that anything as fundamentally spartan as chocolate must actually be magical itself, which would add a dimension or twelve to the problem, so let’s not.) When you’re talking about humans and magic … well.

The first day I made Wild Chocolate Sourdough, the coffeehouse suddenly got quite a lot quieter.

Not boring quieter, as when a particularly dull tour group came through, the sort of people who’d found they didn’t really like the trip they’d signed up for but didn’t feel able to say as much and so treated the whole excursion-to-Old-Town thing as a chore to be slogged through. Not chore-slogging quieter.

 _Peaceful_ quieter.

The noise level at Charlie’s had never gone completely kali out of control the whole time I’d worked there, though we did do a good occasional raucous gathering, especially around certain holidays. But as with any good neighborhood hangout, our regulars each brought their own, often wildly different life experiences and political beliefs with them when they walked through the door, and between those and the effects of sugar shock plus infusions of whichever you preferred between caffeine and champagne (or both, provided you were willing to give Charlie or Mel your keys beforehand pending approval to walk afterwards), the conversation could get pretty heated even when we weren’t at a packed-to-the-rafters time of day. Peaceful, in other words, was not really anywhere close to the sort of thing you thought of when you tried to describe the coffeehouse gestalt. Most days Mel wound up gearing out of the kitchen to do his patented Menacing Loom of Silence over at least one table of arguing eaters.

The first day I made Wild Chocolate Sourdough, not one table of the many served that day qualified for the Menacing Loom. Or even a raised eyebrow from Charlie, which had much the same effect on a smaller scale.

Which I wouldn’t have known, because I tended to be far too busy zephyring my way through the astonishingly vast quantities of baked goods it took to feed our customers on an average day to actually watch anyone eat any of them, except that the quiet _quiet_ QUIET was all any staff member wandering over to my realm to snag a snack could talk about. No fires to put out. No debates to referee. No would-be food-fighting children to evict with a pacifying piece of shortbread. Just a lot of low-key contented conversation—and, by the end of the day, not even a crusty end of sourdough left for me to toast as a driving-home nibble.

Not that weirder things haven’t happened at Charlie’s—this is Old Town, after all—and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it if it hadn’t happened again, from the quietly happy crowd through to the complete sourdough consumption, the second day I made the stuff.

And the third.

When the sourdough came round in the rotation for the fourth time, I let Paulie make it. From my starter, because if what I thought was going on was, in fact, going on the starter wasn’t going to be the issue, and also because: my bakery, my baked stuff, my starter, period. I’d never let an apprentice make one of my specialties before I’d had it under my hands for at least six months, and I could see Paulie’s seams practically bursting with the desire to ask me what in the hells was going on. (No: I mean I could really _see_ them. Aigh. I looked away quickly and pretended I had flour in my eyes.) He kept his mouth shut, though, which said good things about his instinct for self-preservation and thus probably also for his baking sense, and did as I’d asked him. It was a Thursday morning. Thursdays tended to be our slowest days, and thus also our quietest. I got him started on the first rise while I dealt with a particularly recalcitrant batch of the Blob and then coached him through the rest of the process from punchdown to plating, being very careful not to touch the dough myself.

Every bit of Paulie’s batch of sourdough disappeared that day into the maws of the loudest, irritablest, most argumentative bunch of customers, not just for Thursday but for any day, that the coffeehouse had seen in my memory. By the end of the day, everyone on staff except me had had to quell at least one angry outburst—even Paulie, who stopped Pat and Jesse from taking one another on in the little back patio by shoving giant cream-and-currant scones into their open mouths. Charlie said he’d never seen anything like it and hoped never to see anything like it again, thank you very much, and if I could see my way clear to making a batch of Lemon Lust bars that evening and not telling anyone else it was there, he would come get it when evening-shift cleanup ended and maybe, possibly share a bit with Mom and the boys on the way home.

Charlie never asked me to make anything; he ate whatever I made with one of his genuine sweet smiles, even during experimental phases when I’d botched the sugar-to-flour ratio. I made two batches of bars and put them both in the walk-in refrigerator for him. Then I went home and worried.

The next Tuesday morning, Paulie was off. I made a quadruple batch of Wild Chocolate Sourdough in the mini-loaf pans I usually didn’t bother with because they were so hard to get really clean, snuck into the coffeehouse during a brief lull, and put a half loaf on each table with a small sign saying Happy Kali Bread Day (gods bless the greeting-card people for giving everyone license to invent their own holidays, is what I say). I told Mary and Kyoko I was field-testing a change in the recipe and they cheerfully agreed to keep the tables restocked with sourdough and update me on customer numbers and moods in return for as many Killer Zebras (Mary) and chai-spiced oatcakes (Kyoko) as they could eat.

Even for Tuesdays, when generally we got mobbed because of having been closed the previous day, this Tuesday was a record-breaker in terms of customers, with nearly all of our regulars coming in at least briefly for sourdough and … something else and a really spartan quantity of new faces doing the same. Until we ran out of sourdough, because even a quadruple batch in mini-loaf pans couldn’t stretch forever and I also had to bake about a zillion other things, Mary and Kyoko said it was also the calmest, quietest, _politest_ day anyone on staff had ever seen.

I went home that night and worried a little more.

Starting that Wednesday, along with everything else in each day’s selection, I baked one item a day from the list of new ideas I’d come up with on and since my first post-Bo day back in the bakery. I kept Mary and Kyoko enlisted in the watch-the-customers plan by promising them I’d bake their favorites when my “field testing” ended, and I kept track of what they told me each day.

Which provided unequivocal evidence of the pattern I’d hoped not to see. Day two, Raspberry Ruination; despite bright sunshine, the coffeehouse mood was morbidly morose, and two of our more stoic regulars actually burst into tears. Day three, Chai Nut Buttercups; all day long saw waves of beaming customers, even though the coffee machine chose that day to die. Day four, Cocoa Chaos; the revivified coffee machine worked brilliantly, but pretty much everything else that could go wrong did, from Kenny dropping a full tray of soiled crockery on his way back to the kitchen to Charlie burning his arm on an inexplicably malfunctioning burner. Day five, day six, day seven: each day I made something new, and each day the mood in the coffeehouse altered somehow to fit it.

Oh, Shiva wept. My food was _changing_ people.

 

*****

 

It was your hands that touched it, your hands that carried the charm. –Sunshine’s grandmother

 

At the end of my evening shift on the seventh day, I found Charlie, shoved a wodge of warm Wild Chocolate Sourdough liberally slathered with Sinnamon Spread into his hands, and waited until he’d bitten off a Charlie-sized mouthful to tell him I needed a day or two to myself, away from the coffeehouse.

Six months ago, a request like that would have sent Charlie into damage-control mode, all non-anxious presence and worried eyes and Trying Very Hard Not to Ask. But I wasn’t the only one who’d had a difficult time of it since then, nor the only one whose lifeview’d been knocked a bit askew; licking buttery bittersweet chocolate rather thoughtfully from his hand, he gave me leave to go with just a shadow of mild concern across his face.

I did not want to see that shadow as clearly as I could—as I couldn’t help but do. File that damned sight Con had given me under “permanently mixed blessing.”

I puttered home in the usual cloud of noxious fumes—the Wreck’s efforts to run were becoming noticeably more, well, effortful—and went up to my apartment, carrying with me the equally usual bakery bag I’d filled from the day’s leftovers on my way out the coffeehouse door. Grabbing my pillow, by now a bit threadbare from the stain-removings I’d put it through but still usable, and a heavily ugly afghan Mom had crocheted for me during her mercifully brief yarncrafting phase, I went out to my balcony and sat crossed-legged in the moonlight pooling in its center. I shoved the pillow between me and the house’s wall, aligning it vertically to cushion as much of my back as possible, and tucked the afghan’s rough folds over and around as much of me as it would stretch to cover. (Which was a lot: the yarn had been on sale in ten-skein bundles and Mom had succumbed to the siren call of saving a few blinks, after which she’d discovered no one but me could stomach the colors it came in, so I’d wound up with something more like a small free-form pup tent than the lap cover she'd intended to make.) I set the bakery bag down within easy reach and put a bottle of water beside it. I turned my face up to the moon’s light, as I’d done to the sun’s the day I came back to the bakery and began making magic with my baking hands.

And I stayed.

I stayed there on my balcony that night, and the next day, and into that night as well. I stayed there, in the changing light and the varying brightness and the shifting of shadow from scant to all-encompassing. I slept occasionally where I sat, and I ate my muffins and drank my water and tried not to panic myself into irrevocable knots, using all the self-distraction tricks I knew or had heard of. Everything Aimil’d turned up when Mel was trying to quit bacc, everything Mom used on Kenny to get his dragonfly mind to sit still long enough to pass grade three (and four, and seven, and … but it worked each time, so Mom had to be onto something). Everything I could think of.

And when none of them worked—when every effort I made to think myself peaceful ended, unsurprisingly, in failure—I thought about my hands. My hands, and what they could do, and about what to do now, with them and with myself.

I had done harder things, and recently, but not by kali damn much.

Twice I dreamed of myself _without_ hands, sitting upright on my balcony in my dream as I did in dreaming it, everything around me the same as in the waking world except that my forearms ended suddenly in slow-spreading lakes of black and a laugh like sawing rusty metal echoed in my ears. I woke with a shout, my spine aching against the pillow where I’d pressed it hard against the wall, just as I’d done in that lakeside ballroom what seemed like aeons ago, and my hands clenched so tightly into fists that the knuckles gleamed white in the moon. There on the balcony after we’d finished Bo and the goddess of pain had finished with us (for the time being, anyway), I’d thought that Con was returning my hands to me, restoring them from the ruined fragments I’d felt them to be to wholeness—sore, but sturdy—with the rest of me. Had I been wrong? Had … ending Bo’s existence tainted them for good—them and whatever I made with them? Gods and angels, I hoped not.

Awake, I thought of many things.

A little about leaving, but not for long. My family was here, chosen and blood and … other. Old Town was my place, Charlie’s the home of my heart. I was not going to let the whole magic-handling thing uproot any more of me than it already had. I was _not_. Besides which, the nature of my magic meant leaving solved nothing: my hands weren’t a wand or a ward or a working to be abandoned here and replaced elsewhere, an outside object charged with power, and they could not just be left behind.

I thought about wards—about whammies and charms, jujus and rosarios, but mostly about wards. I knew wards existed that could alter a person beyond recognition, change their very essence. I also knew there weren’t many of them, and what little I’d been able to find on them on the globenet in the past suggested that the essence left after such a ward had done its work, while certainly different from what it had been, tended also to be considerably worse. I still wasn’t sure what all of my essence _was_ , exactly, but I didn’t see that this would improve things much, if at all. Plus which, wards like that had been illegal as anything since before the Voodoo Wars, mainly because they inevitably involved dubious ingredients and ceremonies that reputable wardskeepers avoided like the plague and any use of which they were in fact honor-bound to report as a violation of their fundamental oaths. I didn’t _know_ any _dis_ reputable wardskeepers, or in fact any wardskeepers at all besides Yolande, as thanks to Mom’s precautionary shopping I’d had no need for them in their professional capacity in my usual-before-the-lake life. Yolande was an ally and a friend, and her house was my home; I had no desire to jeopardize any of that by asking her to do something so fundamentally against her principles, not to mention either ineffective or fatal or worse than fatal. And I couldn’t imagine finding another wardskeeper whom I’d be willing to trust with my life who wouldn’t have the same principles. So, no, then.

I thought a good deal about self-transmutation. My power lay in altering matter; surely self-change was part of that power? Logically: this wasn’t the me I’d been a year ago, ergo it wasn’t the original me, ergo I had—I must have—a proper shape to which I could return. Could be returned. But whether you could actually _do_ such a thing to yourself, little say _should_ do it; how far back in life you had to go to get to your original self (I had no desire to revisit my childhood, having not thought much of that whole affair the first time around); what would happen if you got it wrong, as, I felt, I inevitably would do, and what precisely the human-named-Sunshine-shaped version of my grandmother’s simple red-stoned ring as transmuted in my hands to a Baroque nightmare might look like … Upon considerable reflection, as Yolande might say, I thought it pretty clearly a bad idea even to try.

I thought about never baking again. About just … stopping. All of it. No more flour and sugar and butter. No more lemons or almonds or yeast, wild or tame or otherwise. No more Bitter Chocolate Death, no more Cocoa Chaos. No more loving with food. No more love. No more, no more, no more …

… I became aware that I was weeping, weeping as I had done that last night at SOF, as I had done the night Con healed the cut on my breast. Weeping in a way that hurt down to my bones, as I had wanted to do so many times in between and since. My head ached fiercely, as did my various scars; my cheeks were wet, and the afghan’s rough acrylic yarn scratched my fingers where I’d drawn it up in great swathes, clutching it against my chest as though I’d never be warm again. I put my head down against my knees and wept until I could hardly breathe.

When I finally lifted my head, the quality of the night’s silence had changed, and I knew without looking that Con stood behind me in the shadows of my living room.

“Sunshine.”

“Con.”

“You are not baking.”

“How—”

“Your scent has changed.”

“Oh.” Oh. Well, of course it had. I wondered briefly how. Sunshine Lite: less butter, more blood? Ugh. I decided not to ask. “I am not baking, no,” I agreed, turning my tear-swollen face up again to the moon. “At the moment, it doesn’t seem … wise, somehow.”

“Why?”

“Um.” I thought about how to answer that. “Things ... happened. After. At the bakery. I made—and then— and Paulie—and I didn’t—” My throat closed, and I was weeping again, forehead pressed against the afghan over my upraised knees.

“Sunshine.” Con’s voice was much nearer now, just behind me and to my right. I turned my head towards where I thought it had come from and saw he’d shifted with his usual inhuman speed and now sat on my floor, back to the wall just inside the balcony door, still safely in darkness but close enough that I could see the sharp outline of his features in profile. “Breathe.”

Hah. Funny peculiar thing for a vampire to say. Because yes, they breathe, but it isn’t anything like humans breathe, is in fact about as _ufo_ different from human breathing as vampire movement is from human movement or a vampire heart is from a human one, meaning being told by a vampire to breathe isn’t anywhere near as useful a centering suggestion in times of existential crisis as you might imagine it would be.

Still. In Con’s voice—and I discovered I now found Con’s voice as distinctively familiar as Mel’s, or Pat’s, or Charlie’s, which considering he was most definitely Other and they were manifestly (mostly) not I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with—the command helped somehow, giving me something to hang onto in the midst of my own private maelstrom. I tipped my head back against the balcony wall and breathed in deeply through my mouth. I felt, rather than saw, Con breathing with me, a motion I knew must be as deliberate a synchronization as my timing my breath to his all that time ago by the lake had been.

I went on breathing. Behind me and to my right was silence—the waiting-for-me-to-say-more kind, as distinct from the I-was-not-going-to-like-this kind in which Con rather specialized. Finally: “If you wish to say more about this, you may.”

I choked out something that might have been a laugh. “If I wish to say more about this. I can’t think of anything I’d like less, to be honest.”

“You appear to be … troubled.”

I laughed again. Maybe I’d get better at it with time. “You could say that, yeah.”

“Do you have anyone else to whom you may speak of what troubles you?”

I wanted—I started—to say yes, of course: Mel. Charlie. Mom. But I knew what the real answer actually was. “No,” I said, and pressed a hand—my hand, my baking and killing and magic-wielding hand—to my breastbone to stop myself from crying again at the sound of that single word.

“Then speak. If I cannot help, I will say as much. If I can help, I will.”

I opened my mouth to decline and found myself talking instead, telling my vampire— _my_ vampire?—my woes at warp speed as if I was one of the ninnier _Blood Lore_ characters I’d never liked, the ones who had to bear the burden of exposition while the heroine swanned about choosing the most picturesque and romantic way to die. Winding down at last, I sat, tired beyond the telling it, holding my hands before me so that the moonlight hit them full in the palm. I felt a little better with all of that out in the open, but not as much better as I’d have liked.

Con stirred behind me. “Sunshine,” he said. “You cannot truly be surprised that this has happened.”

“Don’t say that.” I rounded on him as best I could from my seat by the door. “Don’t say that. I _can_ be surprised. I _am_ surprised. My bakery is supposed to be _my_ space, _Sunshine’s_ space. It _is_ that. It’s a good place. It belongs to me. It doesn’t belong to magic, or to—to Others, or to anything other than baking good things and feeding people. What I do there is _good_ , Con. I help people. I make them feel good, feel better, feel loved. If I don’t have that any more—if what we’ve done, if _magic_ , has taken that from me—” I choked, coughed, breathed in, let go. My head and hands felt swollen and tired.

“Sunshine,” Con said again. Then: “I do not doubt what you say. Indeed, given our recent work together, I am certain you speak the truth.” He made one of his indescribable vampire noises; I translated this one provisionally as indecision. Then: “In that house by the lake, as the sun rose, you talked to me, to keep my mind away from daylight’s threat. Do you recall what you offered me, before your storytelling began?”

Now it was my turn to sit silently. I did recall—at this remove of time I remembered nearly everything about that whole experience with the razor-edged clarity of pre-Wars movies—and I didn’t want to talk about it now any more than I’d wanted to talk about it since it happened. Finally: “Yes. I—Recipes. My recipes, or what there is of them, since they’re mostly in my head, like all good recipes, so I never really write them down after the first time I make them, even though I change them as I go until what comes out of the oven matches what’s in my head, unless I have to for Paulie—”

“Sunshine,” Con said for a third time. He didn’t tell me again to breathe, but it was implied, and anyway I could hear myself babbling away like a panicky brook, so oxygen seemed a good plan.

“I offered you recipes,” I said, when I felt like I could just about manage whole punctuated sentences again.

“Yes.” He paused. “When I … begged you to speak to me, there in that house, I asked that you tell me who you were. What you did with your life. The first thing you said was that you were the baker in a coffeehouse.”

“Well, I _am_.”

“The first thing, Sunshine. Before you told me of your family, or your history, or your leisure hours.”

“Because I _am_ ,” I said again. “Baking is what I do, but it’s also who I am. … Oh. _Oh._ ”

“Indeed,” Con said. “When you held that metal knife in your hands and opened those hands on a key, your power began to stir. When you ended Bo’s existence, it awoke irrevocably. It moves in you now, no longer dormant. Power requires an outlet, and use of power requires an instrumentality. Your hands are central to the way in which you most commonly interact with the world. You use them hard, daily, intentionally, deliberately, creating work of your heart of which others then partake. That your power, once live, would find its outlet in your most basic form of expression is to be expected.”

I could see the logic in that. What I couldn’t see was what to _do_ about it. “All right, let’s say for the sake of argument that I accept that. What do I do now? I don’t even understand how it _works_ , what I’m doing or not doing on a given day or with a given dish, why my sourdough calms people down and my springerle make them act like caffeinated three-year-olds, why the new things I make affect people and my old standbys don’t. I can’t just keep on … baking people into submission!”

“No, you cannot,” Con said calmly—what seemed to me like calmly, anyway—and I felt my agitation subside a tiny bit. “Your power is formidably strong. You would not have been able to do what you have done had it been otherwise. But it is raw and ungoverned, and if you do not contain and shape it, it, and you, will run amok. You must train yourself, or find someone to train you.”

“ _How_?” I wailed.

“I will help you. There are, I believe, some items among the treasures my master collected but could not use that spoke to you when you were in my … living space.” I nodded, speechless. “I will give them to you, if they will go. And I will tell you what little I know about how to use them.” Con’s voice stopped for a moment. Then: “I will do everything in my power to help you, Sunshine. But alone, I will not suffice. My power differs too much from yours. You need someone human, too, from whom to learn.”

I laughed, not because anything Con was saying struck me as particularly funny, but because at that moment I couldn’t think of anything else to do. “Any suggestions for how to find this particular human? Ad in the local newssheet? Globenet directory search? Put up posters on Old Town lampposts—‘Wanted: Magic Teacher. Must Be Willing to Work for Pastry’?”

Con was silent for a moment. Then: “The owner of your home—Yolande, is it not?—is a powerful magic handler. I think you will find that she is awake tonight. I suggest we ask her for her thoughts in this matter.”

“…we?”

“Yes. She knows of me; she knows more of you than you know, both of your essence and of what you have done. I believe she may prove to be a good teacher for you, to be able to help you in ways that I cannot. And if she and I are to work together, even in parallel, we must meet, so that our efforts aid and support you rather than setting you at cross purposes with yourself or others. Do not worry,” he added, clearly anticipating the objection I’d opened my mouth to give. “Like you, Yolande is exceptionally strong of will. She is not susceptible to my … persuasive powers, even if I would attempt to use them against her, and I give you my word that I will not do so.”

I couldn’t find it within myself to argue with him further. I was too tired, and too heartsore—not to mention bodysore, _ouch_ —and way too far out of my depth, and I thought he was probably right about all of it anyway. I trusted Yolande, and despite everything—or maybe because of it—I trusted Con as well.

I pushed myself to my feet, wincing as my joints creaked in protest after all those hours of immobility. Stepping into the darkness of my apartment, afghan draped around my shoulders like a cut-rate superhero’s cape, I took a deep breath—and held out a hand to the vampire on my living-room floor.

After all, I had to start _somewhere_.


End file.
